Application: service-manual-frontend

Serves the Service Manual and Service Toolkit on GOV.UK

• GitHub: service-manual-frontend
• Ownership: #govuk-platform-health
• Hosting: AWS, on the draft_frontend machine class
• Continuously deployed?: Yes
• Rake tasks: Run a Rake task on Integration, Staging or ⚠️ Production ⚠️
• Links:
  • Sentry (error tracking)
  • Puppet configuration
  • Deploy scripts
  • Deployment dashboard
  • Publishing E2E scenarios (warning: not all apps have E2E tests)

Example pages rendered by service-manual-frontend

• Service Standard
• Service Manual
• Agile delivery
• How the discovery phase works
• Understanding WCAG 2.1
• How the alpha phase works
• How the beta phase works
• Service Toolkit
• Making your service accessible: an introduction
• User research

README

Service Manual Frontend is a public-facing app to display the service manual formats on GOV.UK.

Technical documentation

This is a Ruby on Rails application that fetches documents from content-store and displays them.

Dependencies

• content-store - provides documents
• static - provides shared GOV.UK assets and templates.

Development notes

The application does not serve content at its root (/) - the homepage will be found at service-manual-frontend.dev.gov.uk/service-manual but only if the content item for the homepage exists in the content store.

You can achieve this by restoring from a production backup, publishing the home page using the rake task in service-manual-publisher or by using the dummy content store.

Running the test suite

The test suite relies on the presence of the govuk-content-schemas repository. If it is present at the same directory level as the service-manual-frontend repository then run the tests with:

bundle exec rake

Or to specify the location explicitly:

GOVUK_CONTENT_SCHEMAS_PATH=/some/dir/govuk-content-schemas bundle exec rake

Visual regression tests

Use Wraith (“A responsive screenshot comparison tool”) to generate a visual diff to compare rendering changes in this application.

Wraith does not work correctly from within the VM because assets-origin.dev.gov.uk is not resolvable within the VM, and so none of the assets load. You should instead install wraith on your local machine and run it from there.

Wraith has some dependencies you’ll also need to install.

First, on master branch, run:

wraith history test/wraith/config.yaml

Then, on a branch with your changes, run:

wraith latest test/wraith/config.yaml

This will generate image diffs comparing the two runs, including a browseable gallery of the output, in tmp/wraith.

Use of BEM

The Service manual frontend application uses a modified version of the BEM methodology, coined by Harry Roberts.

It uses the following conventions:

• block, element and modifier names are written in lower case
• words within the names of BEM entities are separated by a hyphen (-)
• an element name is separated from a block name by a double underscore (__)
• modifiers are delimited by double hyphens (–)
• Key-value type modifiers are not used

A block:

.button

An element:

.button__icon

A modifier:

.button--large

Licence

MIT License